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two new drawings

Monday, October 31, 2005


click to enlarge

I'm running out of Kims to draw! I keep telling her she needs to let me take more pictures soon.



click to enlarge

This is one of my favorite pics from audubon park. I like the drawing, but it's hard to know when to call it done. I think i need to make the shade on the ground a little darker at least.

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the bss show

The BSS show Friday night was pretty good, but i came away feeling a little unenthused about it and i've been sorting it out in my mind since. It's not just the show itself, but seems to be this running theme with me lately. However, rather than turn this into the diatribe on affectation that's been brewing in my mind for some time now, I'll just say that there were aspects to the show that i thought came off as rather contrived, which was a bit disappointing.

Here's a good example: Somewhere around the middle of the show, Kevin Drew, the lead singer, asks the audience for a show of hands, "Who's in love?" like he's going to stand up there and express all of our being-in-love for us. (haha) A few hands go up, he says something like "...dark times in Chicago," which was at least a funny response to that audience's lack thereof, but really, come on. This ain't springtime in the meadow.



I think, too, though, Kevin Drew just kinda creeped me out. That's him in the middle. Yes, kevin, we can all see that you are arty.

After i'd come home and was thinking about what it was that i hadn't liked about the show, i came across this from pitchfork's review of the previous album, You Forget It In People:

Broken Social Scene. No one wants to admit that they like a band that goes around calling themselves this-- a band who, judging from their artwork, stands around all day looking pensive, crouching, and feeling the music in dramatic grayscale, a band that finds its home on Arts & Crafts/Paper Bag Records, who puts the message "break all codes" above their own barcode, and who dedicates their album to their "families, friends and loves." I already had them pegged! How could they not be the most unimaginative, bleak, whiny emo bastards in the whole pile?
He then goes on to give the album the great review it deserves.

someoneIKnow: maybe he's just a cheeseball
sophrosyn1: yeah
sophrosyn1: it's hard to resolve how much i like the music with how unimpressed i was with him

So it goes.

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broken social scene

Friday, October 28, 2005



I'm going to Chicago tonight to go see Broken Social Scene and I'm pretty excited for this show. The new self titled album isn't getting quite the reviews that the last one, You Forget It In People, got but perhaps that's just because that album was a bit more of a surprise. This album has that one to follow and so it's scrutinized a bit more closely, i think. The concensus opinion seems to be that its not quite as good, but we all know that collectively people are fools. Its not the same, but I think this new album easily equals the last one. It's more manic. I've read all kinds of adjectives, from cacophonous (in the discordant sense, not the unpleasant sense) to bombastic. Read about it on amazon or pitchfork (at least they had the sense to put it on the BNM list), you'll get a pretty coherent picture of how varied the album and it's reception both are. Everyone does agree though, that it's good. It's a bit noisy at times, but this is a band with a lot of people. It seems appropriate that it should have a lot of sound. I personally am a fan of lots of layers and polyrythyms.

Whatever. Decide for yo'sef. I'll openly mock you for not going to the show afterward.

Here's track 11: Superconnected

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cafepress store

Tuesday, October 25, 2005



I created a CafePress store, mostly to create a few products that i would like to have personally. So far there are only a few sophrosyne shirts and an oval NOLA bumper sticker (like the ones with European country codes on them). The sticker isn't an original idea, i saw one at rebuild504's cafepress store, but i didn't like that one so i made my own.

It's pretty cool how the CafePress stores work. As a basic store "owner" you don't pay anything. They set the base price on all items to cover their costs and profit, and you set the markup from $0 on up. You upload your artwork using their templates and... that's pretty much it. The one drawback i've found (so far) with the basic store is that you can't have more than one of the same type of item, which could prove pretty limiting. For example, i can only have one "White T-shirt." I can have the gray t-shirt and the organic cotton t-shirt and the fitted t-shirt, but not more than one of each. To upgrade my store would only cost $7/month, so if ever i'm selling more than 7 products a month I'll upgrade the store. I wouldn't count on that happening anytime soon, though.

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City Park, NOLA

Saturday, October 22, 2005

Just like the food and the music, City Park is New Orleans, its past, its present and its future.

[Just to clarify up front, none of these words or photos are mine. This is a story from New Orlean's Times Picayune, the local paper, by a staff writer named Martha Carr. I have edited the story down for my site, but it's worth reading in its entirety. The pictures are by a local NOLA photographer, Coleen Perilloux Landry, whose gallery i found looking for images of City Park. I had been thinking about writing about the stone bridge in city park when i found both the article and the pics and thought it'd be interesting to juxtapose them. Links to both follow.]


The damage to City Park from Hurricane Katrina is simply staggering, the worst in the 150-year history of New Orleans' pre-eminent green space. Not only were hundreds of trees torn from their roots and stripped bare by Katrina's roaring winds. But more than 90 percent of the 1,300-acre playground was flooded when concrete floodwalls along the 17th Street and London Avenue canals failed, sending water streaming into the city's midsection. Forty percent of the park stayed under brackish water for more than two weeks, Hopper said. As a result, about 1,000 trees have been toppled, and another thousand are expected to perish by next spring.




The bottom line is that City Park's revitalization is a key to making the reconstruction of New Orleans successful and to improving quality of life in a city that now, more than ever, needs beautiful green spaces. City Park's problems are twofold. First, it has lost of almost all its operating revenue, to the tune of $10.6 million a year. That's critical, because the park receives only $200,000 annually in tax support for operations, making it an anomaly in a country where most communities publicly fund their major parks. Secondly, the park sustained almost $43 million in damage. With virtually no rainy day fund, it can't afford to patch roofs and cut Sheetrock, let alone pay for more extensive repairs.




FEMA is providing some help. So far, contractors have cleared most roads in the park, and they are removing dead trees, a service that will save the park millions of dollars. But there are plenty of other problems the park can't begin to address without additional assistance. Virtually every building in City Park was damaged or destroyed, including the administration building with all of its computers, records and archives. The park lost its entire fleet of vehicles, including mowers, bucket trucks and backhoes. Even grass cutting is not within the park's present range of abilities.




The most extensive damage was to the park's 14,000-tree forest, likely to be reduced by 2,000 in the spring when waterlogged root systems add another thousand dead trees to those blown over by the storm. Fortunately, many of the park's oldest live oaks -- including the entire majestic grove along City Park Avenue -- appear to have survived the hurricane. But scores of pines, water oaks, magnolias, cypress and crape myrtles weren't so lucky. In a cypress grove along Marconi Drive, about 40 trees were toppled, Hopper said. Most of the crape myrtles that lined Filmore Avenue were blown over.




There are some bright spots, though. The New Orleans Museum of Art -- considered one of the most important museums in the South -- was virtually unscathed. Damage to the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden, which opened in 2003, was limited to ruined landscaping and the toppling of a single sculpture. Most of the park's architectural features, including the Peristyle, Popp Bandstand and Popp Fountain, appeared intact during a tour Oct. 2. The park's fountains and statuary also were still standing.




The 26 life-sized fiberglass figures in Storyland, the park's fairytale theme park for children, were beat up but salvageable. Mother Goose still hung from her tree limb. Pinocchio sat perched atop his wide-mouthed whale. Even the Botanical Garden, which had extensive damage, showed signs of hope, with magenta and lavender lilies sprouting in the lily pond, and sprigs of grass beginning to grow from under the brown matted lawns.




The problem is the sheer magnitude of the challenge ahead. One mile wide and three miles long, the park is one of the nation's largest tracts of urban greenery, stretching from the city's midsection to the residential neighborhoods that line the lakefront. But it's possible some parts of the park could make an early comeback. A strip of land that stretches from the museum toward City Park Avenue somehow escaped floodwaters, leaving several tennis courts and the children's playground relatively unharmed. The nearby casino building also appears repairable, though it was extensively looted and sustained wind and rain damage on the second floor.


Full Times Picayune article by Martha Carr

Gallery of photos by Coleen Perilloux Landry

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100 Novels

Friday, October 21, 2005



They call it "The Complete List | TIME Magazine - ALL-TIME 100 Novels," but it's not really fair to call it "Complete" or "All-Time", then stipulate "English-language" and post-1923. It automatically rules out Don Quixote, anything by Proust, Dostoyevsky, Gabriel Garcia Marquez...

I wonder where they came up with 1923, anyway. It's too specific a date to be arbitrary. Either way, I've read 9/100 of the books. It's funny that of all the Kurt Vonnegut books they chose Slaughterhouse 5, which i would agree is the one to put on the list, but from Philip K. Dick they chose Ubik and not Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Bladerunner), which is a much more accessible story. Not that accessibility is the issue...

It also reminds me that i mean to read Midnight's Children.


Come to think of it, though i'm not saying he should be on the list, it seems a bit odd that nothing by Tom Robbins is on the list.

There's a good discussion of this article going on @ Jason Kottke's site.

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work in progress

Wednesday, October 19, 2005


click to enlarge


this is based on one of my favorite pics of kim. i don't think i'll post the original pic till this is done. i have a lot more shading to do in the face.

i managed to find my old copy of Illustrator 7, which works quite well on my old 400MHz laptop. It's funny because the lines aren't anti-aliased, so it really looks like "computer art." Then i open it up in Illustrator CS2 on the big computer to finish things up and everything is so much cleaner and smoother. Finding that old copy of illustrator could really helped to speed things up-- it allows me to do a little drawing in illustrator while the kids are still up playing.

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Kim Reading, Watercolor

Sunday, October 16, 2005


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I finished it! With quickness, too. Imagine that. This is why i like watercolors... there's no messing around. It takes just minutes to fill in a large space.

I don't know what i think about the blue background. I know why i did it: i wanted to create some contrast between the background and her skin. The thick black outline probably would have created enough separation, but i didn't really consider that much at the time. The other thing is that it separates the focus, Kim in the chair reading, which is all warm colors, from the environment, the lamp and the negative space, which are cool colors.

The other thing i was uncertain about was what to do with the floor on the right side by the chair. I decided to make the floor gray to mirror the lamp, to create some balance on the bottom, as it's bookmarked by those two small vertical gray shapes.

I think the thing about the piece that's bothering me is the colors, which are admittedly rather simple. I'm not sure that it's really a drawback, per se, since i was kinda going for this illustrated, cartoony
look. So yeah, i don't know. Kim likes it, though! She's even gotten past the no face thing.

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Hey Bert! Sporty shoes!

Thursday, October 13, 2005



I was writing some comments on a friend's site (frequent commenter, Jason), a guy who went to the same high school as me, and was reminded of my 10th grade Geometry class. In my high school history, I don't think that there was any class in which I misbehaved more than this one. Several of my good friends were in this class with me, including Randall and Ron, with which I am still friends 15 years later. My wife was even in this class with me for a few weeks, but she changed her schedule. (See, we have history.) Why did you switch classes, kim? Was it for another class, or did you tell me that you just weren't learning from Ms. Simon? Who could? I can honestly say that I never did pay attention in her class, even when she wasn't teaching it anymore (perhaps especially so then). I don't think I ever did my homework either, for that matter. On the morning of tests I would go through the assignments and practice questions at the back of the chapter, figure out how to do them, then take the tests. I usually got B's, but only because my technique didn't allow me the time to learn Theorems. I'd fake my way through those.

Ms. Simon would stand in front of the box fan and her skirts would fill up with air. It wasn't like they'd blow up over her waist or anything; God help us if they did. They would inflate and she'd stand there teaching us with her dress billowing out around her like a hot air balloon.

For the second semester of class we had a student teacher whose name I can't remember because we never addressed him by his name. We called him Bert. Initially, it seemed to really piss him off, but I think he eventually got used to it and just kind of accepted it. Ms. Simon was in charge of the yearbook or the graduation ceremony for that year's seniors or something else innocuous, so Bert would teach us and she would leave. Bert was fairly good natured about our taunting and even tended to joke around with us. He would walk into the classroom and, without fail, Randy would ridicule his shoes, no matter what he was wearing.

Randy and I were big into cartooning that year and geometry class was like studio time where we'd share new drawings and ideas. Of course, it didn't please Ms. Simon and Bert that we weren't paying any attention to them, beside the fact that we tended to draw those around us into what we were doing, not what they were teaching. There was one instance in particular that I remember in which Randy was drawing his character, Jim, in costumes and other nonsense. He was showing the drawings around and Bert snapped "Randy, what are you doing?"

"Oh, I'm just seein what a man would look like in a tutu."

So Bert took the paper and went and sat at his desk. Randy later turned and caught Bert looking at the cartoons and laughing at them.

When we took tests, teachers would often have a shallow cardboard box, like when you buy a case of sodas from Sams, on the corner of their desks where you stacked your test when you're done. I don't know WHAT inspired her to do this, but at one point Ms. Simon put the box on a shelf directly between Randy and I behind our desks. I could see if she was doing it to test whether Randy and I would cheat, but she didn't... she didn't monitor us at all. So as the tests came in, we'd grab them out and copy down whatever answers we still needed. It was ridiculous.


Before geometry class I had biology. The biology classroom didn't have desks, it had "lab tables" which at one point had been full of drawers, but only about 15% of the drawers were still there. All of the empty slots were full of trash and graffiti and whatnot. Randy and I weren't in biology together (though Kim and I were, which is another store of good memories from high school). Randy had biology later in the day, as did this girl Meg that we basically chose not to like. One day Randy and I were talking about which tables we sat at and, as it happened, Meg sat at the same table as me. Toward the end of the school year, I decided it would be funny to write "MEG IS A B****" in one of the empty drawer slots. Of course, she didn't know where I sat, how would she ever know.

Well, it didn't take her long to find out.

So one day she walks into geometry class, walks straight up to my desk (which was now at the front of the room by Ron, as Randy and I had been separated-- which lasted maybe a week before I just moved myself back). I was busy talking to Ron when she put her hands on my desk, leans in toward me and asks "Why am I a B****?"

"What are you talking about?"

She repeats herself.

"Because I'm trying to have this conversation..."

Then Ms. Simon walked into the classroom and had everyone sit, at which point I was saved from Meg's wrath. But rather than let it lie, we decided to give her an answer in the form of a twelve-point list of all the reasons we could make up of why we didn't like her, titled "Why I hate Meg," co-authored between Ron, Randy and I, highlighted by reasons like "because you wear that hideous polka-dot coat."

Kim hates that story, and for good reason, it was rotten. But I'm not big on confrontation and that list managed to convince Meg to never speak to me again.

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"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice"

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

I'm reading A Prayer for Owen Meany; I'm about 60 pages in. Owen is the narrator's best friend. He's not a midget, but he's a kid of extrememly small stature and a voice that is undescribably broken.
His vocal cords had not developed fully, or else his voice had been injured by the rock dust of his family's business. Maybe he had larnyx damage, or a destroyed trachea; maybe he'd been hit in the throat by a chunk of granite. To be heard at all, Owen had to shout through his nose.

[...]

I have been engaged in private imitations of Owen Meany's voice for more than thirty years, and that voice used to prevent me from imagining that I could ever write about Owen, because--on the page--the sound of his voice is impossible to convey.
Whenever, during dialogue, Owen speaks, his words "ARE ALWAYS IN ALL CAPS." It may not be accurate to John Irving's intention, but whenever OWEN SPEAKS, I hear his words as if they were being spoken by David Sedaris. If you're not familiar with David Sedaris, he is an author of short stories frequently featured on This American Life where he reads his own stories. This is how i know his voice.

This is how i know the voice of OWEN MEANY.

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msnbc article about scooters

Friday, October 07, 2005

Is a motor scooter in your future?

An article sent to the Section8SC (SC == Scooter Club (in Milwaukee)) yahoo group this morning. It's an ok article.




I don't know that the article is going to necessarily convince hordes of people to go out and buy scooters, but i suppose making the public more conscious of them is never a bad thing. For what it's worth, i don't have to mix oil and gas for my scooter and i don't think that you do with new Vespas either. I know that's one of the hassles that has always turned people away, which makes me question how much attention the illustrator was paying to the job.


Tangent: on my ride home the other day i was thinking about my old 73 VW Beetle that i had after high school and the connection classic VW drivers feel with each other. You pass someone driving another old VW, you wave. It's similar with scooters, except that it's not about brand. Almost every person i pass on a scooter waves, honks, nods, etc., which is especially odd, being in uptight milwaukee, but it's nice.

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Vividas Streaming Page

Thursday, October 06, 2005

The first 9 minutes of the movie Serenity.

It's full screen and, if you switch apps, the player gets crashy. I can't tell, from these 9 minutes, if it's going to be good or completely retarded. The only person i know that's seen it, Mr. Chet, has a tendency of liking bad movies so i can't ask him. Has anyone else seen it?

I get the feeling that it's a mediocre idea being hyped as genius, but i shouldn't judge it based on 9 minutes and a blurb from the director.

guyiworkwith: there's a chance you'd might like it if you haven't seen the series
guyiworkwith: but the EXPERIENCE is to watch the series then the movie
j: you have access to the series?
guyiworkwith: yep
j: DVD?
guyiworkwith: yep
j: is it bad?
guyiworkwith: they're loaned out now, though
guyiworkwith: no, it's quite good


so who knows.

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watercolor in progress

Wednesday, October 05, 2005


click to enlarge


So, i pulled out the opaque projector and traced the Kim Reading drawing to Bristol Board and have started filling it in with watercolor. If it comes out well, this may be the final goal for all of the Kim drawings, but who knows. I don't necessarily think that i need to paint it or draw it or "touch" it to legitimize it, necessarily, as artwork, but i guess part of me does feel like it at least needs to become tangile, leave the screen. I like the idea of printing them out as large scale b/w line drawings... but this is the thing i love about watercolor: it's fast. I mean, i learned to do illustration with color pencil, and i really like the effect, the detail you can get, the richness of the colors, the waxy residue that builds up... but working with color pencils is so slow. It's ridiculous. And 2/3 of your time is spent sharpening the pencils. Ink is a little faster, but not a whole lot. And i didn't really like the way that the combination of ink and watercolor was going.

Ironically, i do plan to do the line drawing on top of the color, which isn't much different than inking it in, except that i'll use the paints for that too. And no cross-hatching. I need to buy a nice stiff brush.

My daughter asked me this morning "Are you going to do momma's face on that picture, daddy?"

No.

So anyway, i don't know how well it really comes through in the crappy digital picture but the brown chair came out really well. (The chair was actually a turquoise chair from the 60s... I took a bit of necessary creative license, figuring the brown would go well in keeping with the warm tones.) The chair looks very plush and textured and inviting... so i'm pleased. I have a feeling it's going to look very crisp once the black outlines go on.

Now i have to figure out what book she'll be reading. Perhaps one of these days it'll be Swann's Way, Kim.



I did my first oil change on the scooter tonight and was looking at the owner's manual:



I need a job making these drawings. Where do i sign up?

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Mute Witness

Ma boy turned 2 today!



Happy Birthday, chubby little fat-faced (non-)talking pinata. Maybe this year your vocabulary will catch up to your cuteness.

I got him a truck that carries two motorcycles on the back. One for him, on for me.

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Operation Eden

Monday, October 03, 2005

Operation Eden is a website by a guy, Siege, who is originally from New Orleans, now living in NYC as a photographer. I don't know him, but I feel like I do. It's strange. After reading through his site and some of his personal history, I can't help but wonder if I've met him before. He went to Mildred Osborne Middle School, though I don't know when it was that he was there. I was fortunate not to go to Osborne, but I lived 2 blocks from it on Coventry St. in N. O. East.
"It was walking distance to Lake Pontchartrain, which now covers the playgrounds I used to fight and run and play and cry on."
Perhaps you skated with us there too? We used to bring our skateboard ramps to Osborne and skate with huge groups of guys, most of which we barely knew. Across the street from Osborne was Kenilworth park where all the little league baseball games were, where we'd go to get snacks from the concession stand and convince ourselves that one day we'd talk to some of the girls that hung out there.

So Siege, whose real name is Clayton James Cubitt, grew up poor, moreso than I, and like many of the people I know from nola, left the city to find prosperity. Or himself, or an outlet, or a way out. Whatever his case may be. Eventually he bought his mom a trailer in Mississippi which, as his story goes, was her Eden. Hence the name. Eden was destroyed by Katrina and Siege created the Op. Eden website to do what he can to help her, not by asking for donations, but by selling prints of his work.


(Pardon me for cropping your photo.)


Here is a set of Katrina pics he took, posted in his personal portfolio site.

You can buy prints of Siege's work from various sets at this site. (His photography is really good, but some of the sets will not be to everyone's tastes.)



His story resonates with me because of some similarities in the situations with our moms. By the thursday after Katrina, especially after talking to my Aunt, I was starting to get pretty bugged out about not hearing from my mom. I expected that it was a communication issue, but there's only so long that you can assume the best before worry takes over. If I didn't hear from her the next day I most likely would've been taking a long drive... fortunately she called at about 10am that Friday.

For a month now my Mom and her husband have been staying with some friends in Bush, La. I'm sure when they went there to ride out the storm they never expected they'd be there that long and I think things are beginning to get quite cramped.

My mom paints billboards for a living, but who knows if the company will come back. They paid her her last paycheck and 2 weeks' severance and sent her a notice of termination so that she can apply for unemployment. She's now getting food stamps which allows her to at least make a small contribution to the household, but she has yet to get a FEMA debit card. My wife's family decided that, rather than send donations to the red cross or any other organization, they preferred to contribute money to any of my family members who need the help. My dad is ok in slidell, my grandparents are being taken care of by my prosperous, generous aunts and uncles in Dallas, so my mom is going to be getting a few dollars in the mail. Beyond this, I don't know what my mom and her husband are going to do. He is back working at his job in Slidell, but for the long term it's possible that they may wind up leaving the state. Or at least the immediate area. Who knows. I personally would welcome the move; new orleans has always been such a place of struggle.

In contrast to Siege, though, I feel especially fortunate for my family. My mom could have some pretty difficult times ahead of her, but it seems like nothing in comparison to what Siege's mom has gone through in the last month, and the lengths he has gone to to help her through her difficulties.


The local news here (maybe this is everywhere) runs these stories that I call "Bringing the Tragedy Home," where instead of reporting about a travesty, they'll find some local guy with a connection to the story and tell us all about him. I've tried to avoid talking too much about the specifics of my family's situation because I don't want to come across as trying to "get my share" of the story. The focus needs to be on Louisiana and the gulf coast. But in Siege's case, I applaud him for all of his effort, vigilance, and caring. Help him, if you can.

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